B Y J A M E S C A R V I L L E
SPEED KILLS How Clinton's rapid-response team back in the campaign of 1992, we were into slogans. "The Economy, Stupid" was the most famous one to emerge from the War Room -- and it will probably follow me all the way to the grave. The one that I really liked was "Speed Kills." We had the slogan printed on the back of T-shirts for all the members of our rapid-response team in Little Rock. In a mere two words, it summed up our whole approach to ousting an incumbent President. We wanted to respond to attacks faster than my wife Mary and all her right-wing buddies could launch them. We wanted to catch their ads off the satellites and come up with response ads within a day. We wanted to be nimble enough to put together huge rallies at the drop of a hat. Most of the time, we moved fast. Real fast. We even got out a devastating response to Bush's convention speech before he uttered its first word. I didn't think we could do it again this year. And that has nothing to do with the fact that I'm not around cracking the whip. The main reason is that Bill Clinton is not the challenger anymore. There are some advantages to being an incumbent, like getting your picture taken in front of a fine looking seal that says "President of the United States." But on the whole, it's easier to run as a challenger. Incumbents' campaigns are usually as big, lumbering, and uncoordinated as a drunken hippo. Challengers can be much more fleet afoot. As an incumbent, you might be the best campaigner in the world, but you still have to deal with the full-time demands of running the country. Dole, in contrast, is free to do nothing but stage campaign events and work on his tan. An incumbent has the dead weight of a huge entourage every time he wants to go out on the road. Not only does that entourage make logistics a nightmare and slow everything down, it also costs a hell of a lot to move it around. An incumbent has to deal with tighter security, which restricts what you can do and how quickly you can do it. As Mary put it in our book, "All's Fair," "You've got Secret Service agents in a constant state of high freak, preventing normal people, the ones who are going to vote you back in, from getting up close." As you can imagine, that's a big bummer for our extroverted President. An incumbent almost always has a rift running right through his campaign. In most incumbent campaigns, the folks who work in the White House think they walk on water and don't trust the campaign people who are hired to wage the reelection battle. During George Bush's 1992 campaign, the rift was huge. Mary says the White House bureaucrats thought the campaign people were "dopes, Neanderthals, and thugs." Communication between the two sides often broke down. Coordination was always a nightmare. Amazingly, none of my fears came to pass this year. The President's reelection team is running circles around the challenger. Bob Dole has squandered his natural challenger advantages. He's getting killed by speed. Let me give you one recent example. As you might imagine, all four of the principals who debated last week mobilized their troops to prepare them for every possible question the moderator could ask. What you probably did not know is that each side's troops were also working behind the scenes during the debates, to respond to the other side's attacks. The Clinton-Gore team works about twice as fast and produces material twice as good. On the day of the debate, the Clinton-Gore team, a surprisingly seamless blend of campaign kamikazes and off-duty White House aides, assembles at the campaign's rundown downtown offices, in a room recently and appropriately dubbed "The Boiler Room." It's hot and cramped and the pressure during a debate is as intense as it ever was in the War Room. Veterans don their old "Speed Kills" T-shirts for the occasion. The goal is to create two documents. The first document, which gets faxed to every major news organization in America a few hours before the debate, is a "prebuttal." It lists the opponent's likely attacks and then gives a response to each one. The second document is rebuttal, and it goes out to news organizations the moment the debate ends. Each of the opponent's actual charges are spelled out verbatim and then responses are laid out with statistics and quotes and other material that reporters can easily lift to make themselves look clever in the morning paper. Given that the networks are no longer turning to spinmeisters like me for commentary after the debates, the prebuttal and rebuttal documents are all the more important. Not only do the Clinton-Gore documents spew out of the news organizations' fax machines before the Dole-Kemp ones. The Clinton-Gore documents are much better. In the vice presidential debate, the Clinton-Gore prebuttal was right on the money. It contained good responses to at least half of Kemp's actual attacks. The Dole-Kemp prebuttal contained no responses. It had only sample questions that they thought Gore might have trouble answering. And like Kemp himself, the Dole-Kemp rebuttal document was off-message and incoherent. For example, in response to Al Gore's undeniably accurate claim that the President has had middle-class tax cuts on the table for two years, the Dole-Kemp team came up with this non sequitur: President Clinton vetoed Republican tax cuts in 1995. That's not rapid response. It's vapid response. This week's presidential debate will be harder on both sides. Since it's in the town hall format and average citizens will be asking the questions, neither side knows exactly what to expect. But this we can expect: Dole's attacks will be free-flowing this time around. He's getting awesome pressure from powerful right-wingers to go negative. They want him to at least go down swinging. So the President and his debate-prep and rebuttal teams will have their work cut out for them. Smart money says they'll do just fine. Will Dole go down fighting, as Carville predicts? Join Carville in Table Talk.
Bookmark: http://www.salon1999.com/weekly/carville.html |
